The Marchand Woman

She said, “Move.”

“Be careful with that thing, woman. You could trip and set it off.”

“That would be a crying shame,” she snapped. “Move.”

He stepped out into the road and she followed. Draga moved forward a pace at a time, head lifted, apparently sca

Without warning Draga wheeled. His elbow whacked the revolver aside. Instinctively she clenched her hand—the revolver slammed her palm in recoil; the noise was earsplitting; the bullet went harmlessly off the road somewhere; and Draga was swinging his heavy boot against her—a clumsy kick, off-balance, but it pummeled her off her feet and she sprawled. She didn’t lose her grip on the gun but she was still trying to roll over and face him when something—it must have been his boot—thundered against her kidney and propelled her over the edge of the road’s shelf and then she was tumbling, rolling, falling down the slick mud of a nearly perpendicular mountainside—brush whipped at her, clawed her face; rocks rattled under her; she was falling in space, then sliding in muck—the world spi

Things went nearly black but she heard the bellowing of Emil Draga’s voice somewhere far above her and she peered through the haze of her vision—brush and trees loomed at crazy angles. She heard the rush of water.

She’d lost the revolver, of course. A kind of equilibrium returned to her, she got her bearings and distinguished up from down. Above her was the track of her own sliding fall—she was incredulous at the length of the scar her body had sluiced in the mud: She must have fallen nearly a hundred feet and she wondered how many of her bones were shattered. It was a clinical thought, detached. She lay motionless, blinking. Pain gradually flooded through her system; everything ached.

At the top she didn’t see anything move at the rim of the road. It occurred to her that Emil’s voice was fading. He was still yelling but it was farther away. He must be ru

In a little while, she thought, they’d come back and finish her.

She wondered if she could move.

She lifted her head away from whatever had cushioned it. Well at least the head and neck worked. She looked down the length of her body.

The jeans were ripped, a long slice along the left calf. There was no open cut but the skin was abraded and dappled with angry red dots.

She lifted her left hand experimentally and winced at the sudden pain in it, but she closed it into a fist and opened it and continued to stare whimsically at it. There was a nasty raw blot across the back of it where she must have flailed against something. But the fingers functioned.

Now the right hand. It was pi

But nothing refused to articulate.

She had fallen into a scrub of some kind: more bush than tree. She’d crushed half of it but the rest of it supported her, a sort of latticed mattress of twig and leaves. The pitch of the slope began to level off here. It tilted down more gently—another twenty or thirty yards perhaps; trees at the bottom and she couldn’t see beyond them.

If she’d come off the rim twenty feet to either side she’d have dropped into boulders. If it hadn’t been raining incessantly the slope wouldn’t have eased her fall. If.… By blind luck she was alive.

Silence now, only the rattle of flowing water below in the trees. She didn’t hear Emil Draga any longer. Raindrops began to drip on her.

With a rough uncaring need to know, she curled her feet under her and attempted to stand up.

The bush collapsed under her. Clinging to it she fell another ten feet and slid to a painful halt, both hands splayed to ward off obstacles. Her palms, now, began to bleed.

She trembled with a pounding violence that she found almost comical: She grunted with effort and stubbornly climbed to her feet and lurched downhill until she blundered up against the slimy trunk of a big tree; she stood against it numbly, waggling her toes inside her boots, moving her arms about, sucking a great breath into her chest.

Everything hurt, everything throbbed, but unaccountably the organism appeared to be in rudimentary working order.

She rubbed both abraded palms against the cloth of her blouse, smearing blood and mud together. Christ. Somehow she was alive.

Then she heard them—a faint clanking; voices. Coming along the high shelf of the road above her. She recognized Emil Draga’s bellowing anger.

It wasn’t thought; it was primitive impulse that drove her back into the protective darkness of the jungle.

Her breasts felt as if they’d been squashed under a tractor and her hands stung so badly she could hardly stir them, and one knee had gone wonky—a ligament or something; it hurt every time she put her weight on it at a certain angle. There was a frightful bruise along her right hip, her left calf was sharp agony where it had been scraped raw and both shoulder blades felt as if they’d had chips axed out of them. She had welts on cheek and forehead; her scalp hurt frightfully where a lock of hair had caught in something and been ripped away; she had a thin bleeding line in her lower lip, like a paper cut—she kept licking it—and her teeth felt as if they’d been jarred loose. Both elbows gave her trouble and she found a new pain in her shoulder when she tried to lift her right arm to ward off a branch she ducked under.

She went slowly downhill through the stinking growth; steam eddied about her. The tattered rags of her outfit clung to her like shreds of flesh on a rotting corpse. She found the water almost immediately—the source of the sound she’d heard: a stream, birling off rocks and swirling through a big pond and disappearing through a narrow gap beyond. The noise she’d heard was a small waterfall beyond that gap.

The rush of the waterfall made it impossible for her to hear anything from above. She didn’t know if they were following her track down the cliff. Most likely they’d have to use ropes to get down there—or go around, if they knew another path. Were they coming after her?

I would, she reasoned. They couldn’t take anything for granted. They’d need to see for themselves that she was dead. They’d come down here and look for the body.

They’d follow her tracks.

The sudden realization shot hopelessness through her. She couldn’t get away. It was only a matter of time—a few minutes at best.

No way to outrun them. The shape she was in, she could barely hobble.

She sat down gingerly.

“I’m sorry, Harry. I gave it my best shot.”

She whispered the words and her eyes rolled shut.

Harry.…

The thought stu

“God damn it—I am not dead yet!”

Cu

They can’t follow tracks in water.

The pond was mostly bordered by the exposed roots of trees where the soil had been washed away. She gripped the roots and lowered herself slowly into the water, at first stu

Take your time now. It wouldn’t do to get swept out into the current and carried over the waterfall. She moved along with slow deliberation, clinging to out-jutting roots, moving from one handhold to the next.

They’d expect her to go downstream—downhill—toward the bottom of the mountains and escape.